Though some modern productions have played with notions of her blackness, imagining her as a kind of female Othello, Shakespeare’s contemporaries did not regard her as black. George Abbott, who was born within two years of Shakespeare, made the point explicitly in his Brief Description of the Whole World wherein is particularly described all the Monarchies, Empires, and Kingdoms of the same:

Although this country of Egypt doth stand in the self same climate that Mauritania doth, yet the inhabitants there are not black, but rather dun, or tawny. Of which colour Cleopatra was observed to be; who by enticement, so won the love of Julius Caesar, and Antony. And of that colour do those runagates (by devices make themselves to be) who go up and down the world under the name of Egyptians, being indeed but counterfeits and the refuse of rascality of many nations.

“Tawny” was an orange-brown color, associated with the sun, but clearly differentiated from the blackness of the Moors of Mauritania. It was the color of “gipsies” (Abbott’s “runagates,” i.e. renegades), who claimed to come from Egypt (the accepted modern term for Gypsies, “Romany,” is irrelevant and confusing in this regard—it has nothing to do with Rome and only dates from the nineteenth century). Whereas Iago insults Othello with racial abuse directed at his black features, the Romans insult Cleopatra by calling her a Gypsy, associating her with a tribe famous for indolence, vagrancy, theft, fortune-telling and verbal wiles, magic, and counterfeiting—exactly the characteristics of Shakespeare’s representation of Cleopatra’s court. If the play is to be read as a dramatization of the workings of racial prejudice, then it would be historically more truthful to relate it to prejudice against Gypsies than prejudice against black people.

Gypsies were often associated with beggars, and part of the paradox that is Cleopatra comes from the sense in which the opposite poles of regality and beggary meet in her. Antony begins his journey with the claim that “There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned,” while Cleopatra ends hers by recognizing that the “dungy earth” is both “The beggar’s nurse and Caesar’s.” Refusing to demean herself by begging in supplication to Caesar, she welcomes the beggar-like Clown instead and purchases the asp that she will nurse at her breast. It seems that her main reason for refusing to surrender to Caesar is a refusal to undergo the shame of public display:

…Saucy lictors
Will catch at us like strumpets, and scald rhymers
Ballad us out o’tune. The quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us and present
Our Alexandrian revels: Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I’th’posture of a whore.

This is one of Shakespeare’s most daring self-allusions: he is the scald rhymer and his actors are the quick comedians extemporally staging the revels. Antony has been “brought drunken forth” in the person of Richard Burbage, and the “squeaking Cleopatra” who speaks these lines is Burbage’s cross-dressed apprentice, a young man in his late teens or at most his very early twenties. It is sobering, given that in modern times Cleopatra has been considered the supreme Shakespearean role for a mature female actor, to recall that the original Cleopatra would have been a “boy.” When Burbage’s Antony kissed him on stage, there would have been some in the audience—those of a puritan disposition—who would have felt vindicated in their belief that boy actors were nothing more than prostitutes to the perverted players. The phrase “boy my greatness / I’th’posture of a whore” is positively inviting such a reaction.

THE NOBLE ROMANS?

Where did Shakespeare learn the Roman history that he so memorably dramatized in Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus? Minor variants and improvisations apart, the answer is simple. While most of his plays involved him in the cutting and pasting of a whole range of literary and theatrical sources, in the Roman tragedies he kept his eye squarely on the pages of a single great book.

That book was Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. Plutarch was a Greek, born in Boeotia in the first century AD. His book included forty-six biographies of the great figures of ancient history, arranged in pairs, Greek and Roman, with a brief “comparison” between each pair. The purpose of the parallel was to ask such questions as “Who was the greater general—the Greek Alexander or the Roman Julius Caesar?” Marcus Antonius was paired with Demetrius Poliorcetes, King of Macedon, who was equally renowned as a general and a philanderer. Plutarch’s reason for pairing them was that they illustrated the precept that from great minds both great virtues and great vices do proceed:

They were both given over to women and wine, both valiant and liberal, both sumptuous and high-minded; fortune served them both alike, not only in the course of their lives, in attempting great matters, sometimes with good, sometimes with ill success, in getting and losing things of great consequence.

In the “comparison,” they are both praised for their “liberality and bounty,” condemned for their “concupiscence” and “lascivious parts.” On balance, the Roman is preferred to the Greek because “Antonius by his incontinence did no hurt but to himself [whereas] Demetrius did hurt unto all others.” Shakespeare is not in the business of making moral judgments of this kind. He does, however, place a strong emphasis on Antony’s liberality. On the night before the final battle, Octavius Caesar begrudgingly agrees to feed his soldiers: “they have earned the waste.” Antony, by contrast, lavishes wine upon all his captains. There is little doubt as to which is the more likable leader. On the other hand, to “drown consideration” in a late-night drinking binge is probably not the best preparation for an early-morning battle.

For Shakespeare, the historical “parallel” was a device of great power. The censorship of the stage exercised by court officialdom meant that it was exceedingly risky to dramatize contemporary affairs, so the best way of writing political drama was to take subjects from the past and leave it to the audience to see the parallel in the present. The uncertainty over the succession to the Virgin Queen meant that there were frequent whispers of conspiracy in the final years of Elizabeth’s reign. It would hardly have been appropriate to write a play about a group of highly placed courtiers—the Earl of Essex and his circle, say—plotting to overthrow the monarchy. But a play about a group of highly-placed Roman patricians—Brutus, Cassius, and company—plotting to assassinate Julius Caesar had the capacity to raise some awkward questions by means of the implicit parallel.

In 1592 there appeared in print an English version of the Marc Antoine of the French neoclassical dramatist Robert Garnier. The translator was Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. The ultimate source of Garnier’s Marc Antoine was Plutarch. The matter was that which Shakespeare brought to the public stage some fifteen years later.